Mecha BREAK Has a Lot to Like and a Little to Worry About

ign.com:

Jumping headfirst into Mecha BREAK’s chaotic, frenzied combat is overwhelming at first. That’s partially because its presentation is dizzyingly stylish, with flashing neon beams and blisteringly fast mecha screaming through the sky as you and your teammates do your best to capture a king-of-the-hill-like objective or push a payload. The chaos amps up the energy and tension of each skirmish, and certain bots (like my favorite: the Falcon) have additional abilities to help kick up the speed of a match even further. Mecha Break showed lots of promise during my last hands-on preview in January, and now, after a few more hours of hands-on time with the multiplayer mech shooter in its open beta, I’ve had the opportunity to experiment with more of Mecha BREAK’s arsenal of mecha, as well as get a better feel for its modes and controls. And I’m still highly impressed with its arena shooter-style gameplay and with how good it looks.

While my go-to mech is good for jetting around above the battlefield, laying suppressing fire, and stacking up assists, it’s kind of a glass cannon. That’s where something like the Tricera comes in. New in this beta, this tanky terror is appropriately named after the armored dinosaur. It may be slow and less maneuverable than Falcon, but what it lacks in speed and mobility, it makes up for in raw firepower with its twin gatling guns, overhead cannon, and beefy shields. Each mecha truly feels and plays differently, and I loved swapping between them from match-to-match.

Even the act of unlocking new mecha is really cool. Instead of just gaining a new selection in your pre-match lobby: unlocking a mech using one of the two in-game currencies I encountered triggers a really flashy cutscene, flexing Mecha BREAK’s stellar mecha design while showcasing some of the new chassis’s capabilities. It does remind me a bit of unlocking a new playable character in a gacha game, which points to some potentially concerning monetization practices. Emphasizing my